The sign on the gate says “Chien méchant,” and the dog is certainly méchant. Every time she passes by he hurls himself against the gate, howling with desire to get at her and tear her to pieces. He is a big dog, a serious dog, some sort of German shepherd or Rottweiler (she knows little about dog breeds). From his yellow eyes she feels hatred of the purest kind shining upon her.
Afterward, when the house with the chien méchant is behind her, she ruminates on that hatred. She knows it is not personal: whoever approaches the gate, whoever walks or cycles past, will be at the receiving end of it. But how deeply is the hatred felt? Is it like an electric current, switched on when an object is sighted and switched off when the object has receded around the corner? Do spasms of hatred continue to shake the dog when he is alone again, or does the rage suddenly abate, and does he return to a state of tranquillity?
She cycles past the house twice every weekday, once on her way to the hospital where she works, once after her shift is over. Because her transits are so regular, the dog knows when to expect her: even before she comes into view he is at the gate, panting with eagerness. Because the house is on an incline, her progress in the mornings, going uphill, is slow; in the evenings, thankfully, she can race past.
She may know nothing about dog breeds, but she has a good idea of the satisfaction the dog gets from his encounters with her. It is the satisfaction of dominating her, the satisfaction of being feared.
The dog is a male, uncut as far as she can see. Whether he knows she is a female, whether in his eyes a human being must belong to one of two genders, corresponding to the two genders of dogs, and therefore whether he feels two kinds of satisfaction at once—the satisfaction of one beast dominating another beast, the satisfaction of a male dominating a female—she has no idea.
How does the dog know that, despite her mask of indifference, she fears him? The answer: because she gives off the smell of fear, because she cannot hide it. Every time the dog comes hurtling toward her, a chill runs down her back and a pulse of odor leaves her skin, an odor that the dog picks up at once. It sends him into ecstasies of rage, this whiff of fear coming off the being on the other side of the gate.
She fears him, and he knows it. Twice a day he can look forward to it: the passage of this being who is in fear of him, who cannot mask her fear, who gives off the smell of fear as a bitch gives off the smell of sex.
She has read Augustine. Augustine says that the clearest evidence that we are fallen creatures lies in the fact that we cannot control the movements of our own bodies. Specifically, a man is unable to control the motions of his virile member. That member behaves as though possessed of a will of its own; perhaps it even behaves as though possessed by an alien will.
She thinks of Augustine as she reaches the foot of the hill on which the house sits, the house with the dog. Will she be able to control herself this time? Will she have the will power necessary to save herself from giving off the humiliating smell of fear? And each time she hears the growl deep in the dog’s throat that might be equally a growl of rage or of lust, each time she feels the thud of his body against the gate, she receives her answer: Not today.
The chien méchant is enclosed in a garden in which nothing grows but weeds. One day she gets off her bicycle, leans it against the wall of the house, knocks at the door, waits and waits, while a few metres from her the dog backs away and then hurls himself at the fence. It is eight in the morning, not a usual time for people to come knocking at one’s door. Nonetheless, at last the door opens a crack. In the dim light she discerns a face, the face of an old woman with gaunt features and slack gray hair. “Good morning,” she says in her not-bad French. “May I speak to you for a moment?”
The door opens wider. She steps inside, into a sparsely furnished room where at this moment an old man in a red cardigan sits at table with a bowl before him. She greets him; he nods but does not rise.
“I am sorry to trouble you so early in the morning,” she says. “I cycle past your home twice a day, and each time—no doubt you have heard it—your dog is waiting to greet me.”
There is silence.
“This has been going on for some months. I wonder whether the time has not come for a change. Would you be prepared to introduce me to your dog, so that he can familiarize himself with me, so that he can be shown that I am not an enemy, that I mean no harm?”
The couple exchange glances. The air in the room is still, as if no window had been opened in years.
“It is a good dog,” the woman says. “Un chien de garde,” a guard dog.
By which she understands that there will be no introduction, no familiarization with the chien de garde, that because it suits this woman to treat her as an enemy she will continue to be an enemy.
“Each time I pass your house, your dog goes into a state of fury,” she says. “I have no doubt that he sees it as his duty to hate me, but I am shocked by his hatred of me, shocked and terrified. Each time I pass by your home is a humiliating experience. It is humiliating to be so terrified. To be unable to resist it. To be unable to put a stop to the fear.”
The couple stare at her stonily.
“This is a public way,” she says. “I have a right, on a public way, not to be terrified, not to be humiliated. You have it in your power to correct this.”
“It is our road,” the woman says. “We did not invite you here. You can take another road.”
The man speaks for the first time. “Who are you? By what right do you come and tell us how to conduct ourselves?”
She is about to give her reply, but he is not interested. “Go,” he says. “Go, go, go!”
The cuff of the woollen cardigan he wears is unravelling; as he waves his hand to dismiss her it trails in the bowl of coffee. She thinks of pointing this out to him, but then does not. Without a word, she retreats; the door closes behind her.
The dog hurls himself at the fence. One day, the dog says, this fence will give way. One day, the dog says, I will tear you to pieces.
As calmly as she can, though she is trembling, though she can feel waves of fear pulsing from her body into the air, she faces the dog and speaks, using human words. “Curse you to hell!” she says. Then she mounts her bicycle and sets off up the hill. ♦
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